Africa

Nairobi, March 31, 2016--The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in the semi-autonomous republic of Somaliland to reopen the daily Codka Shacabka (The Voice of the People). The attorney general's office issued an order March 24 for the privately owned paper to immediately cease publication, according to human rights campaigners.

The broadcast journalist Judith Naluggwa, who works for the state-owned station Bukedde Television, was attacked outside a Ugandan court on March 23, 2016 while reporting on a case of a minister at the Anti-Corruption Court in Kampala, according to the local press freedom group Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda.

New York, March 24, 2016--Three international journalists who were covering the elections in the Republic of Congo were punched and had their passports and equipment seized Wednesday by a group of four men who identified themselves as police, according to reports.

New York, March 23, 2016 -- A military court in Mogadishu on Sunday upheld sentences imposed on six people convicted in connection with the December 2015 murder of Somali broadcast journalist Hindia Haji Mohamed.

CPJ writes to Nigerian Police Inspector General Solomon Arase to urge him to arrest those responsible for beating publisher Yomi Olomofe into a coma in June 2015, rather than investigating the publisher on charges of assaulting his assailants.

New York, March 22, 2016 -The government of the Republic of Congo should immediately lift the total communications blackout it imposed before the March 20 presidential elections, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Unknown assailants abducted Salma Said, a reporter with the Kiswahili-language Mwananchi ("Citizen") newspaper and a correspondent for Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, shortly after the journalist arrived at Dar es Salaam's Julius Nyerere International Airport on March 18, 2016, according to news reports and a statement she made to the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition (THRD). Said's abductors released her on March 20, a representative of THRD told CPJ.

By CPJ Africa Program Staff

For 23 years Godfrey Mwampembwa has been a prominent and quick-witted observer of the political scene in East Africa. But all that changed last month when the cartoonist, known as Gado, was told his contract at Kenya's biggest newspapers, the Nation, would not be renewed.

New York, March 11, 2016--Solomon Kebede, the managing editor of the now-defunct Ethiopian paper Ye Muslimoch Guday (Muslim Affairs), was sentenced to prison Thursday, more than three years after being jailed on anti-terrorism charges. CPJ was not immediately able to reconcile conflicting reports on the exact length of the prison sentence.

By Murithi Mutiga/CPJ East Africa Correspondent

Twenty nine-year-old photographer Abubaker Lubowa was excited when he was assigned to cover the campaign of opposition leader Kizza Besigye. He told CPJ he did not anticipate that the assignment would mean he would make the news almost as often as he covered it.